Portrait Of Emilie Floge, 1902 By Gustav Klimt Editorial Image

Even during Klimt's lifetime, it was widely assumed that he and Emilie Floge were lovers, yet the truth of the matter, like many things concerning fin-de-siecle sexual mores, may be considerably more complex. Emilie Floge, twelve years Klimt's junior, was the sister of his brother Ernst's wife. When, some fifteen months after his marriage, Ernst died, Gustav was appointed guardian of the couple's newborn daughter. In this capacity, he had free reign in the Floge household and became something of a surrogate uncle to young Emilie. The surviving correspondence between the two is voluminous, yet entirely platonic their "trysts" involved such innocent activities as French lessons. Would the family have tolerated Klimt's presence in their summer home on the Attersee, as they did almost every year, had the two been clandestine lovers? And would Klimt so openly have paraded his mistress at the theater and opera, as he did Emilie? Klimt's real lovers, as is now known, were not such nice, middle-class ladies, but models and charwomen. If Emilie was the love of his life, she was a pure and sacred love, a Madonna to the whores who, figuratively and literally, occupied the dark alleys offin-de-siecle sexuality.